


been waiting on that sunshine

by noun



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: Epistolary, F/M, Fix-It, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-09
Updated: 2018-04-09
Packaged: 2019-04-20 13:32:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14262057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noun/pseuds/noun
Summary: She thinks about the eleven years between them, the number of times they’ve said ‘stay’, and wonders how these past six hours have made all the difference.Except she’s not twenty-two anymore and refuses to watch this loop play out again.





	been waiting on that sunshine

**Author's Note:**

> A draft I wrote after the series finale that tore my heart out. It's been sitting in my files since October, so here it is.

 She’d felt numb when Tom had told her he was cheating on her with Yukari from billing, that she was pregnant and he couldn’t just abandon her, could he?

Cameron would call herself an expert in abandonment. That, and grudges. They get entwined all together, because you don’t fucking forget what people do to you. Once burned, twice shy.

Once the numbness wore away, she felt nothing. No hate for Yukari, no inclination to do the math that’ll tell her when Tom knocked her up and when the affair started. Maybe a tingling in the tips of her fingers, but nothing more than that. Tom had looked so relieved when she’d left the apartment, wrapped in the Vivienne Westwood sweater she’d bought herself for the California trip.

(She hadn’t washed it, it smelled faintly of Joe’s cologne, and originally, she’d planned to pass it off to a shopgirl once she got back to Japan to see if they could figure out what scent it was. The next step in that plan had seemed elusive.)

And now she feels—everything, all at once. They lay in their bed, and the space between them is bigger than California to Japan. She had gone to Japan to get away from him, get away from /them/, because Tom was good for her, steady and dependable, and she could be that too, once she was away from Joe and the sort of things that happened to people in Joe’s orbit.

She thinks about the eleven years between them, the number of times they’ve said ‘stay’, and wonders how these past six hours has made all the difference.

Except she’s not twenty-two anymore and refuses to watch this loop play out again.

She’s crying when she rolls over to look at him, and the rocking of the mattress makes him glance over. He’s attentive, god, always so fucking attentive, every when he was playing icy bitch in his five thousand-dollar suits, and he pulls her in, against his chest, six foot something half curled over her as if the ceiling is falling in and he intends to shield her from it.

He’s absurd. She hates him. They fit together so well that anything else pales in comparison, and for two people who have independence written in their bones and, in his case, across his chest, are frightened by the idea of needing that.

But fuck the idea of whatever Yahoo is making them play another round of this over another few years. Or never again.

That’s worse.

Her nose is brushing against the scar on his chest, and she holds his bicep while he brushes her hair. She’s bad at words when she’s not putting them in someone else’s mouth, and she wishes she could just—be, and he’d understand it.

“What are we going to do now?” she asks, in the quiet of their bedroom, in their apartment.

“I’m not sure,” Joe says. “What do you want to do?”

Cameron thinks, really thinks, about everything up until now. About how having enough money to do a project means you need accountability to the sort of suit that Joe used to be, what it turned Donna into, and about how not having enough money means someone else gets to be cleverer faster than you.

“Something new,” she admits. Joe’s hand stills.

“A new project?” he tests, and she can feel the tension in him, the gearing up for another Mutiny, another Comet.

“No,” she says. “Maybe we could… start over. For the last time,” she amends, so he can’t miss it. “Live off the grid, or…”

“We could buy a house with a huge yard,” he suggests, somewhat wry, but he’s no longer holding himself so stiffly, and she lifts her head to see him staring down at her. “Stop living in apartments.”

“We could get a dog,” she says, playing along. “Or three.”

“I could become a teacher. You could write books and terrify my students.”

“Alright,” she says, quickly. “Let’s go.”

She makes her choices quickly and decisively. It’s not that she doesn’t weigh the consequences, she does—but running means split second choices, and she thinks that if they don’t get out now, maybe they never will.

“Now?” he asks.

Again, the stress, the way he holds his body like he’s getting ready to move. ‘It’s different this time,’ she wants to say to him, to plead. ‘I mean it. We can be better.’

Both of them have been through too much to believe words. Actions are all that matter. Promises can be broken, even those from someone you love.

“Tomorrow,” she says, and she puts her head down. “We’ll pack and… arrange tickets, and then we can say our goodbyes, and go, but I’m done with this place. And no Texas, nowhere we’ve been before.”

“No New York,” Joe says. “How about Massachusetts?”

“Yeah,” she agrees, and emotional exhaustion has made her suddenly and inescapably tired. Joe rolls onto his back again, but this time, Cameron follows, her head on his chest with his arm around her.

“It’ll work out,” he says, and she nods. It will. They’ve troubleshot this enough. Just once, everything can run smoothly. 

* * *

Pilgrim and the Hibernation of Cameron Howe

October 23rd, 2017

By Anna Welles

 

_For those of us who grew up playing the Space Bike series, the sudden disappearance of Cameron Howe from Atari and the video game industry as a whole has always been an enigma. The internet wasn’t yet at the stage where you could just google for information. Howe’s disappearance was sudden and complete, as was all information about the game she had been teasing for months: a puzzle and exploration game called Pilgrim that she seemed excited to share with her fans._

_When a retro game appeared on Steam earlier this year under the same name, it took only days for the community to realize that this Pilgrim was that Pilgrim, and the name Cameron Howe began to show up everywhere. How had such an amazing career been cut short? How had a game like Pilgrim—designed original in 1994—play now, in 2017 (barring the graphics, of course), with enough brilliance that it held its ground against other indie games released this year?_

_Hunting Howe down took the better part of a month. She has no publicist, no agent, but a friend of a friend gave me her email, and I managed to persuade her to let me take her for coffee and a conversation in a Northampton coffee shop. There were ground rules—I could not ask about her split with Atari, or about Donna Clark, the current CEO and founder of Phoenix._

_Howe is fifty-six, dressed in jeans and what I think might be original Doc Martens, from when being a punk was more than a fashion statement. Her hair is long and braided, with some grey in the brown, and I could have placed her at maybe a decade younger than she is. She thrums with energy and has this intensity to her that would have made me pay attention even if I wasn’t here for her._

" _I was done with playing catch-up,” she says, when I ask her why she left the industry. “It wasn’t like it is now. I’m glad I waited to share Pilgrim.”_

_She talked with me about how it was to be a woman designing games and heading her own team back then. She is precise, giving specific incidents in her career where life “would have been easier” if she was a man, but she avoids naming names. She says she’s not surprised that everything isn’t entirely different._

_“I still read the news,” she says, when I ask her how she knows about recently surfacing accusations of harassment. “Even if I haven’t been in the middle of it in years.”_

_When we move to talk about Pilgrim, her face lights up. When I talk about how I managed to solve the infamous ice puzzle, she’s as open with me as she is during the entirety of the interview._

_It’s suppose to make you think,” she stresses, referencing the randomized nature of the puzzle generation, which would have been utterly revolutionary if it had come out on schedule yet somehow still proves challenging now. “I’ve seen guides and cheats online. What’s the point of playing?”_

_When I mention this makes the game inaccessible for some, she scoffs._

_“They can leave it and come back to it later. I did.”_

_Our meeting concludes when an older man comes into the shop and joins us at her table. Cameron introduces him as her longtime partner, Joe. His hair is entirely white, but he carries himself well in what I suspect is a custom suit. I have further suspicions—that this is Joe MacMillan of the infamous MacMillan Utility—but choose not to voice them, lest the interview be ended early._

_Before we part, I ask her if she has any advice for young women who are in the position she was in when she started out. She looks at me long enough that I think she’s going to remind me she hasn’t worked in gaming for twenty-two years, and then she answers me._

_“Don’t watch yourself keep making the same mistakes.”_  

— Welles, Anna. "Pilgrim and the Hibernation of Cameron Howe." _Polygon_. Vox Media. 23 October 2017. Web. 9 April 2018. 


End file.
